Disconcerting States #5

It’s post-Elected President Day:  November 7, 2024

By John Dean

Writing from Falls Church, Va., US of A (fifteen minutes from the Whitehouse), Thursday noon. Many in Europe now see the current presidential victory as the triumph of American fascism. We will see about that. There’s a long game to play here, with serious guardrails at work, and many an unprecedented event yet to happen and new players to appear. Sufficient unto the day…

At the moment there is far more grey to the state of political and cultural affairs here than there is black and white. If a new order is sneaking up on us here it’s more likely a new kind of US authoritarianism.  At least judging by the man’s outcast, venomous talk over the last few years.

Otherwise, please read a selection of today’s fascinating and revealing headlines:

• Resounding Triumph seals Improbable Comeback for Trump
• We Can’t Keep Relying on the Democratic Party
• America’s Democracy and Alliances Poised for Turmoil
• What’s to Expect from Unified Republican Control of Government
• Are Voters Sick of Foreign Wars?
• Seven States Vote to Protect Abortion Rights
• Harris says Nation Must Accept Election Results while Urging Supporters to Keep On Fighting

One thing that’s clear amid this ongoing news blizzard this cloudy fall day — on this post-Elected President Day:  November 7, 2024 — is that the primary concern here among voters of all ages, levels, races, religions and regions is the shocking US economy here at home. You got to see it to believe its importance.

I walked through the mall and squeezed through the supermarket aisles yesterday and today and what did I see? High prices. Much higher prices. The whole grain Dave’s Killer Bread costs how much? That much?!

Likely the prime reason why Donald Trump got shockingly re-elected is the US economy’s poor condition. The driving force is not a desire for fascism or racism or nativism or any other “-isms” or “-ologies”. His successful election was more about bacon and eggs than it was about ideology.

Please allow me to slightly digress to suggest that what matters here most in the USA is “political culture”. This concept was brilliantly corralled and defined in the seminal study of Wilson’s American Government as “a broadly shared way of thinking about how politics and governing ought to be carried out”. Most Americans share in the nation’s  political culture, very few Americans have an ideology.

Political culture is not an ideology. It’s rather a vague set of  guiding terms such as: liberty, self reliance, equality of opportunity. (Which you don’t have in a crummy economy.) If pushed to define what they mean by their beliefs, most Americans will speak of group or individual principles — meaning a general truth or personal code and not ideology.

My point is, dear reader, to please consider that D. J. Trump was not an ideological choice. He’s a guy hired to fix a problem. Who, of course, brings along a lot of his own problems. Even his Evangelicals agree with that.

Speaking of observations…note how poorly most of the midstream and liberal media got the message of this 2024 Presidential election. Yours truly included. It was like Hilary Clinton redux. Wasn’t she supposed to win? Wasn’t the writing on the wall for Kamala-Hilary? What, she wasn’t elected? Shock horror.

So many of us concerned with the matter thought this presidential election business would linger, that the election would go on for months in courts with thousands of high-priced lawyers squabbling like rabid geese across the nation. Like a bad replay of W. Bush versus Gore in 2000. But history doesn’t repeat itself, only historians do.

So many of us did not expect this landslide. We thought there’d be just a slow dribble of pebbles, a cluster of waves on the beach inching toward a sand castle of a decision — and not this tsunami. Not this mudslide.

Why is that?  Patient, heal thyself. Midstreams and liberals got it seriously wrong.

Finally — back to the economy — consider, if you are out there in everyday American life with a couple of kids. With you and the wife working hard. With car and health insurance to pay and maybe with private school bills to pay and the teenage daughter’s braces you’ve got to shell out for. And mortgages mounting up with costs that sneak up on you week by month by year by Happy Thanksgiving. The Covid is long over, okay. But so what? Your kitchen table troubles are not.

Prices are still on average here 21.4% (twenty-one point four percent!) more expensive since the pandemic-induced recession began in February 2020. Bad news.

Most Americans could not believe that hard-working Kamala Harris, avuncular Mr. Waltz, grandfather Joe Biden & Co. could help them out of the holes they are in. Perhaps Donald Trump can. That’s your choice.

He sure talks like he can. It’s a bet. For a plentitude of Americans, neither candidate was their ideal. We are not talking ideals. US social, cultural and dollars-and-cents unrest hasn’t suddenly disappeared after the election/re-election of the forty-seventh president of the United States.

I get the feeling that many people here feel a plague on both their houses. That Trump, regardless of all his baggage, was the best of two bad choices. You get lemons, you make lemonade.

But can he fix what’s wrong or will he only make it worse?